Ralph Waldo Emerson

About this figure

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister who died when Ralph was eight, leaving the family in genteel poverty. He went through Harvard on scholarships and part-time jobs, then Harvard Divinity School, and was ordained as a Unitarian minister, taking a pulpit at Boston's Second Church in his mid-twenties. His young wife, Ellen Tucker, died of tuberculosis in 1831 after less than two years of marriage, a loss that marked him deeply. In 1832 he resigned his ministry, unwilling to keep administering the Lord's Supper as a fixed ritual he no longer believed Jesus had meant to institute permanently. He then sailed for Europe, where he met Coleridge and Wordsworth and formed a lifelong friendship, sustained mostly by letter, with Thomas Carlyle.

Back in Massachusetts, Emerson settled in Concord, remarried, and began the lecturing and writing that would occupy the rest of his life. His short book Nature, published anonymously in 1836, laid out the core of what became Transcendentalism: a conviction that nature and the individual soul give more direct access to truth than inherited doctrine or secondhand learning. The 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, "The American Scholar," argued that American thought should stop imitating Europe, and his 1838 address to the Harvard Divinity School, which questioned the authority of institutional Christianity, was controversial enough that Harvard did not invite him back to speak for nearly thirty years. Emerson became the informal center of a circle that included Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott, and helped launch their journal The Dial.

His reputation rests chiefly on the essays gathered in Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), which include "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," "The Over-Soul," and "Circles." These pieces are less arguments than strings of aphoristic observations, built from journals he kept for decades and reworked into lectures before they became prose. In 1842 his five-year-old son Waldo died of scarlatina, a grief he tried to work through in the poem "Threnody," collected with much of his other verse in Poems (1847). Representative Men (1850) grew out of lectures profiling Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Goethe as embodiments of particular human capacities. A long stay in England produced English Traits (1856), his close, often admiring study of English character and institutions. Later collections, including The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), and Letters and Social Aims (1875), came substantially out of his decades on the popular lecture circuit, which took him repeatedly across the Northeast and Midwest.

Emerson supported the abolitionist cause with increasing openness through the 1850s and was a steady friend to Thoreau, whom he eulogized after Thoreau's death in 1862. In his last years his memory and command of language declined, and he largely stopped writing. He died in Concord in April 1882.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.